“WE CAN BE AMAZING IF WE WANT TO BE”
Turner takes us behind the scenes of his docuseries Among the Stars, available now on Disney+
You’ve made quite a lot of documentaries, including sports documentaries. How did you find yourself pivoting over to a space documentary?
The more I’ve done, the more I’ve had license to indulge in my passions. One of the great privileges of being a filmmaker is to get to see the world through other people’s eyes. I’ve always wanted to make something about space, and I’ve been trying to get into NASA for a long time.
We used to make a lot of music videos with
One Direction, and we realised that they were so big that they could open more or less any door for us – like NASA. And they came to us once with a song called Drag Me Down, and we were like, well, what’s the opposite of drag me down? Launch on a spaceship! We pitched it, they liked it and we got into the Johnson Space Center just to shoot the One Direction music video, and that was the first time I ever got in there. The recce day was one of the greatest days of my life.
I feel that sports documentaries have come a long way. When we started, it was quite a difficult pitch because the people you were pitching to would just be like, “why don’t you just watch the sport” and “if everyone knows the result, who is going to care?”. We had to think long and hard about how to make them interesting, with a kind of resonance and significance of the story beyond the sport itself. After we made Sunderland ‘Til I
Die, we were like, this method of storytelling really works. What other teams could we follow? Well… NASA. I thought surely if it’s interesting to watch a load of people kick a ball around, it’s going to be interesting watching them set up and go on a mission. It’s actually quite a natural path from sports documentaries to NASA, even though it may seem a bit random.
Among the Stars features people from many areas of the space industry. Has the production of this documentary given you a greater appreciation of all those involved ‘behind the scenes’ on these monumental space missions? Massively. Every time you speak to astronauts, they’re very humble. They’ll say to you, “we are just the tip of the iceberg”. And that iceberg is a huge group of people, in lots of different rooms, each with different tasks, who basically spend their lives going: “If this isn’t ready by Wednesday we’re all screwed.” That’s really dramatic, and it’s a really amazing way of building up what the stakes are so that when the astronauts go out on the spacewalk you’ll understand what they’re doing.
I love it, but if you’ve ever watched an extravehicular activity, it’s like watching paint dry. I sit there being like, I really should be interested in this, but I don’t know what’s happening. It’s boring but it should be interesting. That was the equation to me, and the way to make it interesting is what are the stakes here? What is happening? Getting into the iceberg and meeting the people behind the mission was the answer.
What did you hope to achieve?
That’s really an answer in two parts. What I really wanted to get from it was to get to hang out with people from NASA. That’s really my honest answer. I got to hang out with those people, but I got robbed of the launches and a lot of it because of coronavirus, which I will never really get over because I’m very fond of Chris [Cassidy] and I’m lucky enough to call him a friend. I didn’t get to see my friend go off into space, and that hurts. The bigger picture is that I want to go to space. I want to meet people to help me go to space, so that’s still a work in progress.
In terms of the filmmaking side of it, there are a few ways to answer that. In terms of space, I just think it’s so fascinating, I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t. My career really is me being like, “this is so amazing”. I’m like that annoying dude in the pub but with more resources to try and prove what I think is interesting is interesting.
But I do think that when we were making it, it was an awful time in the world. Politics in America and here in the UK were just really awful – the tone of it and what everyone was doing. People felt awful and we were not able to disagree constructively; there was just despair of humanity.
But I find this inspirational, and I think human beings are terrible, but they are also amazing, even in a pandemic. There are good people, and I find that inspiration. It exists in this world and it exists among those people there at NASA working≈on this mission, coming together to do amazing things.
Fundamentally, I would like people to watch this show and be reminded that we can be amazing if we want to be. It’s happening in the world. If you get on board with those people, if you want to be a part of that, it’s there. The more of us that do that, the better. That will be what I want people to take away from the show.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when producing Among the Stars?
Getting it away was the biggest challenge, just aligning everything. The reason why I say aligning is if you want to make a show with
NASA, they’ll say you have to have funding and distribution to get the access. But you can’t pitch a broadcaster to give you millions of dollars to make a series and then say, “we’ll chat about it once you’ve given me that money”. It was a very tricky thing to try and fit those together, and NASA can’t really bend on these things because they’re a government agency.
Same as when coronavirus came along. A lot of the time when I work, someone says no, and you’re like, “yeah, but really? What if I do it like this?” You hustle; that’s a lot of what the game is. There’s limited hustle with someone like NASA because the rules are the rules. In various forms, you come up against that along the way, and I
Every time you speak to astronauts, they’re very humble
came to realise why no one had made this kind of show beforehand.
But NASA has to manage risk. Once we were in it was amazing, because once you knock on the doors of the people in the iceberg, they’re all geeks like us. They’re like, “oh really, you’re interested in this?” I’m like, “dude, all day long. I’m fascinated. Talk to me”. And it would just spiral from there.
You were able to capture a different side to the astronauts – one we don’t usually see – for example when Cassidy got some sad news and was visibly upset. Were you surprised with how much emotion you managed to capture?
It was what I was hoping for. The stuff we make at Fulwell always has an emotional heart to it, and that’s what I was setting out to achieve, but I think the level of how much people opened up was surprising. There was a moment where Chris was like, “oh, I don’t know if I really want to show that
I’m upset”. I was like, “there’s no one in the world who thinks you’re not upset. You come on camera and go yes, that’s fine. Do you think anyone will be sitting there watching thinking ‘oh yeah, of course, he’s fine’.” That was what we were working towards, that kind of emotion.
What surprised you most when filming Among
the Stars, good or bad?
Professor Ting and that whole storyline was just like a gift from heaven. I remember sitting in that first meeting where he took that meeting room apart and I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I was allowed to film it and that they were cool with it. Just Ting in general.
The first time I ever met him, the first meeting I ever shot was in Germany. He’s addressing a whole room, and it’s literally the first time we’ve ever turned the camera on, and I’m sitting there with my cinematographer, a guy called Diego Rodriguez who I’ve worked with for a long time. I whispered something about the frame and Ting stopped the meeting, looked at me and was like, “can you please be quiet. There’s a meeting going on.” It was awful; I wanted to just shrink and become invisible.
I really didn’t think we were going to get on very well. But after the meeting, everyone in the NASA team was like, “ahh, you got Tinged”. So it was like a right of passage. It sort of really helped me become a part of their team. But he was really just amazing.
Now that spaceflight is becoming more accessible, how does it feel to have been documenting the lives of those involved with NASA at this time of change?
Something that I wasn’t really aware of until I was deep into the process was that I was actually documenting a very significant moment in space travel and potentially human history. Chris’ first shuttle mission helped build the ISS, and on his last mission to the ISS, the first commercial crew came on while he was out there.
I don’t need to tell you how exciting it all is, but it’s a real changing of the guard between NASA, who are across everything, to whatever the future is going to hold. And documenting that moment was pretty amazing. That was a really lovely surprise for me, because as a documentary filmmaker you hope to document something significant
When the documentary was finished, we showed it in IMAX at the Johnson Space Center, and we put on a screening for everyone involved. Honestly, I was on the verge of tears the entire time because there are all these people I’ve met who have put a lot of trust in me. And to show them that and to have them thank me for making it, it was really amazing.
Has Among the Stars given you a new perspective on the space industry?
It’s how I hoped it would be. There’s a lot to it, and I by no means got to see everything. There’s a kind of higher level than the stuff I’ve documented, which is quite political and all about financing stuff. I got a view of a group of people doing things that I hoped they would be doing in the way they were doing them, and I’m lucky enough to count some of them as my friends. I’m more fascinated by it now than I was even going in. More is on the horizon, and it’s so exciting. I couldn’t be more fascinated.